We’ve mainly remembered the sexual theories of Fourier, and it’s true that they’re quite burlesque. It’s difficult to read Fourier with a straight face, with his stories of whirlwinds, fakiresses and fairies of the Rhine Army.
It’s hard to believe he had any disciples, people who took him seriously, who really thought of constructing a new model of society on the basis of his books. It’s incomprehensible if you try to see him as a thinker, because his thought is completely incomprehensible, but fundamentally Fourier isn’t a thinker, he’s a guru, the first of his kind, and, as with all gurus, his success came not from intellectual adherence to a theory but, on the contrary, from general incomprehension, linked with an inexhaustible optimism, especially on the sexual level: people need sexual optimism to an incredible degree. Yet Fourier’s real subject, the one which interests him above all else, isn’t sex, but the organisation of production. The big question he asks is: Why does man work?
What makes him occupy a determined place in the social organisation and agree to stay there and carry out his task? To this question, the liberals replied that it was the lure of profit, pure and simple […] As for the Marxists, they didn’t reply at all, they weren’t even interested, and, besides, that’s what made communism fail: as soon as you got rid of the financial incentive, people stopped working, they sabotaged their task, absenteeism grew in enormous proportions. Communism never was able to ensure the production and distribution of the most elementary goods. Fourier had lived under the Ancien Régime, and he was conscious that, well before the appearance of capitalism, scientific research and technical progress had taken place, and that people worked hard, sometimes very hard, without being pushed by the lure of profit but by something, in the eyes of modern man, much vaguer; the love of God, in the case of monks, or more simply the honour of the function.
…
We defended the idea that a complex, ramified society, with multiple levels of organisation, like that proposed by Fourier, went hand in hand with a complex, ramified, multiple architecture that left space for individual creativity. We violently attacked Mies van der Rohe – who made empty, multi-purpose structures, the same ones that were going to be a model for the open spaces in businesses – and above all Le Corbusier, who tirelessly built concentration-camp-like spaces divided into identical cells that were suited […] only for model prisons.
– Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd, William Heinemann, London, 2011, pp. 143-145
Cf. Adam Curtis on Fourier, here.
